Food stamp cut hits Owsley County harder than most

BOONEVILLE — Rosanna Troyer is coping with the drop in her federal food assistance from $367 to $303 by cutting back on meat purchases and buying more canned goods and macaroni and cheese.

Her 12-year-old daughter is already sick of the hot dogs they’ve been eating frequently at their home in Owsley County, which has the lowest median household income of any U.S. county outside Puerto Rico.

“She says, ‘Mom, can’t we have something else?’ I told her, you got to wait, maybe next month,” said Troyer, 36.

She is one of the more than 47 million Americans who receive food stamps, all of whom saw their allotment drop Nov. 1 as a temporary benefit from the 2009 economic stimulus ran out. Few places feel the difference as profoundly as Owsley County, an overwhelmingly white and Republican area whose own representative in Congress voted against renewing the benefit.

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The drop came ahead of the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s call for a “War on Poverty,” an initiative aimed at expanding the government’s role in education and health care as poverty reduction strategies. The food stamp program grew out the initiative Johnson launched with his Jan. 8, 1964 speech.

The programs played a role in bringing Owsley County and other parts of Appalachia out of what has been described as “third-world conditions” where people died of starvation, said Jason Bailey, director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy in Frankfort.

Across Kentucky, nearly 900,000 people who need food stamps saw a proposed cut of $40 billion from the food stamp program, also known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. And, with the cut in benefits, it appears the gap will widen, particularly in a place like Owsley County, said Jason Dunn, director of the Division of Family Support for the Kentucky Cabinet of Health and Family Services.

Owsley County, home to 4,722 residents, is poor even by Appalachian standards. Its median household income of $19,351 is the lowest outside of Puerto Rico, according to census results. The county is more than 99 percent white.

In 2009, the last year available, government benefits accounted for 53 percent of personal income. More than 41 percent of residents

— four in 10 — fall below the poverty line. In 2011, the most recent year available, 52 percent received food stamps.

“It’s a very poor county and I see a lot of people struggling, I mean it isn’t a day you see somebody, pushing strollers or a cart down the street trying to find pop cans so they can take it in ... to get a little bit of change,” Troyer said. “It’s tough.”